Word: teau
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...Poisson, assistant curator of the Ile de France Museum at Sceaux, traveled over to Choisy-le-Roi for a look. What he saw made his eyes pop. There, preserved under later coatings of the brick & mortar, stood the ornate facade of Choisy-le-Roi's "Petit Château"-the hideaway King Louis XV built for his mistress, Madame de Pompadour...
Modern Frenchmen had forgotten all about the Petit Château but in Louis XV's day it set their ancestors' tongues wagging from one end of France to the other. Frenchmen could only guess at what went on in the privacy of the little château. The royal architects discouraged prying eyes by setting its nine rooms-two boudoirs, dining room, a few guest rooms-in a small garden surrounded by a high wall. Even the servants were kept out of sight. The banquet room was equipped with an ingenious table volante, which could be lowered...
...Sample menu: four soups, three terrines of foie gras, countless hors d'oeuvres, 16 meat courses, partridge, chicken, song birds, pheasant, turkey, squab, 14 desserts, creams and cakes. And Paris had ample evidence that, in her later years, Pompadour turned from mistress to madam, filled the château with a succession of pretty girls to drive away His Majesty's boredom...
After Louis died in 1774, his hideaway fell on hard times. Louis XVI never used it, and during the French Revolution the royal residences at Choisy-le-Roi were wrecked. For a time, a locksmith occupied the site of the Petit Château; later a tile factory was built on the grounds. No one dreamed that so much as two stones of the old building, with its rich trim and fine, high windows, were left standing...
...cars pulled up to a little-used gate at the Duc de Luynes's 8,000-acre estate near Paris. A few blows of a hammer knocked away the rusty padlock; shadowy figures slipped inside, made a beeline for a cellar window in the 17th century château, got it open, and climbed through...